"They Wonder Why People Don't Make PC Games Any More
On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).
Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I'll check and see; if I can I'll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do."
I don't think it's doom and gloom, but I have to say, the stuff that's currently out there is not what I consider top of the line MMORPG's. I play City of Heroes... but it's just a pacifier.. After the downfall of Star Wars G (yes I know it's worn out, but we lost a good game), since, I have struggled to find something worth my hard earned money. I do however, look forward to trying AoC. So, not all is lost.. yet..
IMHO, you could probably make a solid case that MMORPG sales are down on average (with the possible exception of WoW. which has been carrying MMO stats since its launch.) Nothing else is really doing anything to brag about in either design or numbers.
But to say PC gaming is in any sort of trouble after the line up of releases in 07 is a stretch of the imagination to say the least. Almost everything PC gaming touched (almost) turned to gold last year outside of MMO's. (even the expansions were good for the mostpart)
I have to disagree with you here. Wow carries the largest numbers yes. But other than the freak accident that WoW numbers are other MMO titles are doing just fine. If they wherent then they would shut down. Sure MMO gaming might not be as popular as it is now but take WoW out of the picture and MMO's are doing just as well now as they where 7-10 years ago.
To the OP no, I dont think PC games are hurting. The thing with both consol games and to a finer point, PC games thrive on is this. Its not the initial sales. Its the fact that they are STILL selling games a few years after the game is released. The reason for this is, I think, people like me who cant afford to upgrade every year or so to new equipment. We upgrade every year or so to older gear. What I mean by that is, what some of you buy new this year, we buy next year at a largely reduced price. So while I am not playing Bioshock ect now, in another year or so there will be alot like me who upgraded to old/new gear that can now play thoes games. That makes sales go up regardless of when the game was made.
I did a search, but im struggling to find set figures for game sales, all im getting press editorials. I'd be interested to read the set sale records. That said, its been common knowledge that Console game sales have been surpassing PC game sales for decades. And as was said in the video, the newest reason for a lapse in PC game sales is the culture of downloading games from torrent. I download movies, music, but ive never downloaded a game. Purely becuase I know that downloading games is jeapodising the industry and the quality of future games. Bleh. I doubt Torrenting is going to be completely tackled, and even if it is there are other methods of downloading, so the only way this is going to go for PC gaming is with MMO's.
Watch the video in original post.
And well. If you still do not understand.
Let say development of PC game costs 40 million dollars. They sell the games for 50 million (and they count themselves lucky)
Development of XBOX game costs 40 million dolars. They sell the game for 100 million (and they say they did so-so)
Now perhaps i am the dumb one. But if i had a development company , i would not even consider PC development with such figures.
And , if anything we all know game producers are not big risk takers
Watch the video in original post. And well. If you still do not understand.
Let say development of PC game costs 40 million dollars. They sell the games for 50 million (and they count themselves lucky) Development of XBOX game costs 40 million dolars. They sell the game for 100 million (and they say they did so-so)
Now perhaps i am the dumb one. But if i had a development company , i would not even consider PC development with such figures.
And , if anything we all know game producers are not big risk takers
Well advantage of PC game is longevity. Console games are in and out in a few months but PC games can generate sales for years.
There are also a few other things that PC has the upper hand in right now.
PC is king when it comes to shooters. Console players are wannabe shooter players (IMHO) shooters are the bread and butter of PC gaming, without great releases like Bioshock and CoD4, PC gaming would be in serious trouble. Sure, they port these to console but everyone knows if you want the real deal, you play PC.
RTS, same thing. RTS is home on the PC
Mods and downloadable content especially from the community. That right there makes a gigantic difference. The PC gaming arena would be much, much different without Modding. I play BF2 on a regular basis but haven't played "vanilla" in years, same goes for NWN1/2 and Oblivion. Custom maps for RTS games are a dime a dozen. In fact many devs with longevity in mind, make sure that games today include the tools the mod community will need. You name a good PC game thats been around for awhile and its almost guaranteed that there is a strong mod community behind it. Until consoles can do that, the PC is safe.
The main drawback to PC gaming is primarily the expense of continual upgrading. Not everyone runs out to upgrade their PC everytime the next hot game releases. In fact someone here posted a survey that said something 60% of PC gamers can't even play the current generation of games (07). That probably has an enormous impact on sales. Comps purcahsed in 2005/06 are pretty much obsolete however your PS3 and Xbox 360 are still as it ever was.
I blame piracy in a big part. Its staggering how many people that pirate games for the pc. Go to any p2p site(torrent, direct connect etc.) and log on to their services. Do a search for any of the new pc game titles. You will find, and be able to download pirated copies in no time.
What the companies need is to have some foolproof copy-protection. Someone mentioned online activation, that is, the product is unusable if you dont activate it. Now that will cut down on all the piracy by quite a bit I think. The downside to that is that games will be more expensive, which you can blame the pirates for mostly. Its just too damn easy to pirate stuff nowadays.
Quality is ofcourse a big contributer to sales aswell, but when even quality titles sell like shit it tell us quite alot about pc gaming and its future. PC piracy is killing pc gaming, one developer at a time. Just imagine what the prices on stuff would be if there was no piracy, that is no need to put expensive copy protection on your products.
Console gaming is getting just as pricey as mid level pc's and they still do less. It may only be 400 to 600 dollars for the box but then you gotta have all the 'extra' doo dads that companies like Sony and Microcrap er Microsoft leave off so they can continue to bleed money out of you like extra controllers, an extra internet connection fee (for the xbox360 users), memory cards if you want to take a game to your friends house, etc etc.
Personally I don' t think PC gaming will ever die out it'll just continue to evolve. Though hopefully they'll get back to make games fun instead of just pretty.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
The problem is cost. Want a top of the line gaming rig that can run most anything? Its $700+ dollars, and that's if you build it yourself.
You can get any two console systems for that price.
Meanwhile piracy is rampant. I would estimate literally 2-3 times as many people play these games as pay for them. In the case of video game piracy, it is NOT working like movie or music piracy. A lot of the time people will buy pirated movies because they look better, and hey the DVD is only $9.99. Sure, they don't buy the crap movies, but who cares? They're crap. SImilarly, many people are buying music and visiting concerts of their favorite pirated bands.
When it comes to paying $50 though, apparently people balk. Right before the company that made SIN Episodes went under, they reported that they were getting more tech support questions from people who had pirated the game than from legitimate buyers. Given that STEAM has a pretty advanced piracy protection feature, you can see the problem. And more people were ASKING! How many pirates are dumb enough to ask tech support their question?
The Witcher may have SOLD a million copies, but it has probably been played by 3 million people. And while console players lend disks to eachother, that's NOTHING compared to the insanity of PC Piracy. Its sick, and its sad, but I'm actually starting to support hardware-level DRM for gaming.
In the LFGame forum, there was a guy who was asking what new good games he could use on his rig. In addition to MMOs, Crysis and Witcher were suggested to him. He happily reported he was downloading both - this is people's first reaction when they hear of a hot new PC game.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
The high cost of a good gaming rig (I've spent over $3K on mine) and rampant piracy that's been going on for over two decades have caused most games that can be played on consoles to move to consoles.
It started way back in the SNES days (which is when commercial PC platformers more or less died out) and continues to this day. As consoles have evolved to be able to handle more kinds of games I've seen the developers move, en masse, to consoles for those genres.
When the consoles started going 3D a lot of shooters, racing games, and 'free-form' games moved over to the consoles. PC was still king of everything online and everything that included downloadable content, but the current generation of consoles has taken that away as well.
Right now the PC is still king in a few areas though...
User-generated content (console controllers aren't really suited to using any kind of dev tools, even stripped-down ones)
MMOs (control schemes on current MMOs are too complex to work on consoles)
RTS games (controls again)
TBS games (to time-consuming for the average console player)
And I'll leave this spot open so you can flame me for forgetting something
I'm not sure if this will change in the next generation or not (console makers have always been scared of giving gamers a complicated controller or a mouse, though if motion control improves a bit the Wii-mote style of controller could sub for one) but the trend has been for games to move to consoles for quite a while now and I don't really see that changing. There's also the fact that the PC is traditionally where most of the innovation in gaming takes place, since anyone can make a PC game and developing for consoles is pricey and makes devs less tolerant of risk.
Console gaming is getting just as pricey as mid level pc's and they still do less. It may only be 400 to 600 dollars for the box but then you gotta have all the 'extra' doo dads that companies like Sony and Microcrap er Microsoft leave off so they can continue to bleed money out of you like extra controllers, an extra internet connection fee (for the xbox360 users), memory cards if you want to take a game to your friends house, etc etc.
Personally I don' t think PC gaming will ever die out it'll just continue to evolve. Though hopefully they'll get back to make games fun instead of just pretty.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
Wow. "Equal high end PCs." Whatever you're smoking, pass it over to those guys in HazMat gear. Geez, if you're going to talk about PC gaming dying and shoveling cost per hardware as a reason, you're just blabbing out the equivalent of bovine droppings. Get a clue.
I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console.
So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink.
"are easily done on consoles." Yet again. Get a clue. They're made on Developer Workstations. Read: developer PCs. In any case, they're first and foremost plausible on the PC until finalized on an engine optimized for consoles. I'd hand over a pistol to the sorry dev who'd have to develop on a memory limited console.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
Three months extended warranty. Where? Timbuctoo? Give me a break. Only the privi'ed have consoles here. And those that managed to steal one or two would rather pirate the game than buy originals for non-existent support - or be treated as trash by the companies they sought to support, whichever comes first. Good luck, ol' mighty gaming titans, on making money on games.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
Actually, using steam cuts down on piracy, a lot. It's harder to get a cd-key, that has not been used yet on a torrented game, while trying to activate it on steam. They will come up with the message of, "This cd-key is already registered to another account." Unlike most games where you can still install and play them with the same cd-key as someone else, but just can't play online. (Could still use lan, or hamachi =p). And, well, I know it does, because I tried it. I remember when hl2 first came out, I wanted to torrent it to see if it was really worth my money, but the only way to use it without steam, was a complicated way and I was too lazy too attempt it =x.
Console gaming is getting just as pricey as mid level pc's and they still do less. It may only be 400 to 600 dollars for the box but then you gotta have all the 'extra' doo dads that companies like Sony and Microcrap er Microsoft leave off so they can continue to bleed money out of you like extra controllers, an extra internet connection fee (for the xbox360 users), memory cards if you want to take a game to your friends house, etc etc.
Personally I don' t think PC gaming will ever die out it'll just continue to evolve. Though hopefully they'll get back to make games fun instead of just pretty.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
Wow. "Equal high end PCs." Whatever you're smoking, pass it over to those guys in HazMat gear. Geez, if you're going to talk about PC gaming dying and shoveling cost per hardware as a reason, you're just blabbing out the equivalent of bovine droppings. Get a clue.
I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console.
So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink.
"are easily done on consoles." Yet again. Get a clue. They're made on Developer Workstations. Read: developer PCs. In any case, they're first and foremost plausible on the PC until finalized on an engine optimized for consoles. I'd hand over a pistol to the sorry dev who'd have to develop on a memory limited console.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
Three months extended warranty. Where? Timbuctoo? Give me a break. Only the privi'ed have consoles here. And those that managed to steal one or two would rather pirate the game than buy originals for non-existent support - or be treated as trash by the companies they sought to support, whichever comes first. Good luck, ol' mighty gaming titans, on making money on games.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
"I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console."
What part of PC GAMING did you not understand? Why would I want it to become a server? We're talking about PC gaming here. create and store and print out documents, big deal, I can do that on a 10 year old PC I can pick up for 20$. I don't need a high end PC that can run the latest games for that.
"So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink."
Again we're talking about gaming here, not what you need it for work. I know it's shocking to some die hard PC nerds working in the IT section for over 20 years now, but not every profession needs a 2k USD rig to do your job.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
PC gaming is dead in Japan as well. PC gaming is shrinking in the US and really only Europe, Korea and China are left. Very few korean and chinese games reach the west while there are plenty of japanese console games comming to the west, so there will be less modern games comming out for the PC as compared to consoles.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
Well, you better start working on your Korean and Chinese languages if you would like to play those games.
We all have to listen to "PC Gaming is dead" every 4-5 years or so whenever "next-gen consoles" release their next-gen. It's silly really when you consider:
- The percentage of console owners that own a PC is quite high, but the converse is not true -
So question for game publishers/developers is really: Given that the penetration of the PC is quite a bit higher than any of the consoles, why do console games outsell their PC counterparts 4 or 5 to 1?
I think this is where the openness of the PC actually hurt it. Over the last decade, people have learned that:
If I buy a PC game, it may not work on my system
It might even cause instability or performance issues with things I need to run on my PC
There are no standardized controls or conventions
Or even a consistent level of quality control over what's released
People who just don't want to deal with those issues, and would rather play games while lounging on a couch with their friends will play more console games, even though they also own a PC. None of this means PC gaming is dead though, it's just changing as it always does when new consoles get released. Unfortunately, when Starcraft II ships in a couple years and dwarfs the sales of any one console game except maybe Halo (much like WoW, the Sims, Age of Empires II all did), there will be no fanfare of how PC gaming is killing consoles.
There has always been more bad games, than good. That will always be the case, for some reason. PC gaming is surely declining as consoles become more powerful and flexible.
Issues like Windows Vista just reinforces the fact that PC gaming must become more stable and reliable if its going to be a viable market down the road.
I won't say that bad games are ruining PC gaming, because the consoles have more than their fair share of horribly designed and buggy games.
i dont think consoles popilarity has that much to do with price. PCs are such temprimental peices of shit. as much as I love mine, so many errors and problems really piss me off. most people don't have the time or knowledge to try and sort this kind of crap out. firewalls, bugs, lag, errors, viruses, freezing, PC language most people cant understand (mhz, cl4 etc.). the simplicity of consoles and ease of use is what sells them.
its why macs are becoming so popular in terms of non gaming pc's (shame they are balls for games).
I think it really means PC gamers won't just buy any piece of shit on the shelf anymore. We have become very demanding in getting good products and if they are not there we will not buy.
There has been sod all PC games on the shelf to choose from this year.
I would have liked to have bought more, but no one made any.
Uh...it is hard to explain things to average reader of mmorpg.com No PC games are not dying because the games of 2007 were crap. THEY WERE GREAT (At least singleplayer ones) PC gaming is dying because: COD4 xbox sold 1.000.000 copies in 1 week COD4 PC sold 300.000 copies alltogether
And deserved to to sell less.
The Burning Crusade sold 3 million copies in 24 hours.
It was the same the year X-box came out. PC games turned to poo as all we got was ports for a while.
Make a decent game and it will sell. Don't bother, and it won't.
Console gaming is getting just as pricey as mid level pc's and they still do less. It may only be 400 to 600 dollars for the box but then you gotta have all the 'extra' doo dads that companies like Sony and Microcrap er Microsoft leave off so they can continue to bleed money out of you like extra controllers, an extra internet connection fee (for the xbox360 users), memory cards if you want to take a game to your friends house, etc etc.
Personally I don' t think PC gaming will ever die out it'll just continue to evolve. Though hopefully they'll get back to make games fun instead of just pretty.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
XBox 360's and PS3 = low to mid end PC's. You can't actually buy a new PC that isn't twice as powerful. No one has made anything that low spec for over 3 years now. The GFX are 2 generations old, the processors, abandonware designs that the PC market passed over in favour of the Athlon 64. The RAM is slow and substantially less than commonly found in many of todays mobile phones.
They still rock of course, but I wouldn't be getting any silly idea's about them being high powered in comparison to PC's.
I think you may have confused a comparison of the expected power of the console, 3 years before it came out with the PC's of that date and forgot to re-make comparison of what is actually on offer today.
Add to that a basic gaming PC costs less than a PS3 as does it's software and any price argument hardly holds water. As you say the console cost is subsidised by a premium on the games. It isn't cheaper for the end user, and there is simply no way any console manufacturer can compete with PC for hardware prices, their market is positively tiny by comparison.
For the record, computer manufacturers also sell their products at a loss when they are seeking to gain market share with a new product in a competative market. This is common practise in most industries. Intel do it all the time.
I think some one needs to recognise when he has been pitched a sale.
XBox 360's and PS3 = low to mid end PC's. You can't actually buy a new PC that isn't twice as powerful. No one has made anything that low spec for over 3 years now. The GFX are 2 generations old, the processors, abandonware designs that the PC market passed over in favour of the Athlon 64. The RAM is slow and substantially less than commonly found in many of todays mobile phones. It's true that new pc's are faster then consoles. However, there are two things that make the difference quite a bit smaller then the hardware difference indicates. First of all the OS ran by a console takes much less cpu time and RAM then the OS's used on PC. Second of all, since all consoles of one type use the same hardware, the software in general is much better optimised. Also, none of the CPU's used in the current generation of consoles is even considered for the PC market. The Wii and XBOX 360 use designs based on the power pc, while the ps3 uses a cell processor. On average, these designs are more efficient then the architectures used in the PC. These designs simply can't be used by PC's because it is not compatible with the X86 architecture. The PS3 has a bit of a strange processor btw. It's not really fast for general computing, but it can hold it's own against super computers when you're looking at single precision floating point operations. It completely destroys an Athlon 64 at that point. So it actually depends on the type of application ran if a pc is faster or not. They still rock of course, but I wouldn't be getting any silly idea's about them being high powered in comparison to PC's. I think you may have confused a comparison of the expected power of the console, 3 years before it came out with the PC's of that date and forgot to re-make comparison of what is actually on offer today. Add to that a basic gaming PC costs less than a PS3 as does it's software and any price argument hardly holds water. As you say the console cost is subsidised by a premium on the games. It isn't cheaper for the end user, and there is simply no way any console manufacturer can compete with PC for hardware prices, their market is positively tiny by comparison. For the record, computer manufacturers also sell their products at a loss when they are seeking to gain market share with a new product in a competative market. This is common practise in most industries. Intel do it all the time. Intel won't make anywhere near the loss that a console manufacturer makes at the start of a consoles lifetime on all of it's processors. That simply isn't possible since their main source of income is the hardware itself. The console manufacturers have much more legroom since their main income comes from licensing games.
I think some one needs to recognise when he has been pitched a sale.
Console gaming is getting just as pricey as mid level pc's and they still do less. It may only be 400 to 600 dollars for the box but then you gotta have all the 'extra' doo dads that companies like Sony and Microcrap er Microsoft leave off so they can continue to bleed money out of you like extra controllers, an extra internet connection fee (for the xbox360 users), memory cards if you want to take a game to your friends house, etc etc.
Personally I don' t think PC gaming will ever die out it'll just continue to evolve. Though hopefully they'll get back to make games fun instead of just pretty.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
XBox 360's and PS3 = low to mid end PC's. You can't actually buy a new PC that isn't twice as powerful. No one has made anything that low spec for over 3 years now. The GFX are 2 generations old, the processors, abandonware designs that the PC market passed over in favour of the Athlon 64. The RAM is slow and substantially less than commonly found in many of todays mobile phones.
They still rock of course, but I wouldn't be getting any silly idea's about them being high powered in comparison to PC's.
I think you may have confused a comparison of the expected power of the console, 3 years before it came out with the PC's of that date and forgot to re-make comparison of what is actually on offer today.
Add to that a basic gaming PC costs less than a PS3 as does it's software and any price argument hardly holds water. As you say the console cost is subsidised by a premium on the games. It isn't cheaper for the end user, and there is simply no way any console manufacturer can compete with PC for hardware prices, their market is positively tiny by comparison.
For the record, computer manufacturers also sell their products at a loss when they are seeking to gain market share with a new product in a competative market. This is common practise in most industries. Intel do it all the time.
I think some one needs to recognise when he has been pitched a sale.
You're not going to find a pc for 280$ what a 360 can do, or even 400$for what a Playstation 3 can do, trust me, you can't, I have been looking for a PC a few weeks ago, in price comparisson consoles absolutely slaughter PC's. Speaking in terms of gaming, you don't need the crap that is often deliverd with pc's. you do not need a 150$ Operating Windows Vista system. The Xbox360 and PS3 are both high end PC's, in fact, the Playstation 3 is used in research as a replacement for super computers. Anybody who argues that consoles are low to mid end computers obviously has no idea what he is talking about or has a very flawed definition of what is low to mid end.
If we look on what is on offer today in terms of games, it's quite obvious that the standards for high end pc gaming and console gaming in terms of graphics is exactly the same. Sure you have Crysis, but apart from that game there is no PC game out there that couldn't be done on consoles.
Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, they're all considered to the top of the cream of graphics and they are avaible on both the PC and consoles. and ofcourse, Consoles haven't maxed out yet. Insomniac predicts a major leap in graphics every few years on the Playstation 3.
As you can see, the difference between a game running on a high end pc and a Xbox360 game is very, very small
You're not going to find a pc for 280$ what a 360 can do, or even 400$for what a Playstation 3 can do, trust me, you can't, I have been looking for a PC a few weeks ago, in price comparisson consoles absolutely slaughter PC's. Speaking in terms of gaming, you don't need the crap that is often deliverd with pc's. you do not need a 150$ Operating Windows Vista system. The Xbox360 and PS3 are both high end PC's, in fact, the Playstation 3 is used in research as a replacement for super computers. Anybody who argues that consoles are low to mid end computers obviously has no idea what he is talking about or has a very flawed definition of what is low to mid end.
If we look on what is on offer today in terms of games, it's quite obvious that the standards for high end pc gaming and console gaming in terms of graphics is exactly the same. Sure you have Crysis, but apart from that game there is no PC game out there that couldn't be done on consoles. Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, they're all considered to the top of the cream of graphics and they are avaible on both the PC and consoles. and ofcourse, Consoles haven't maxed out yet. Insomniac predicts a major leap in graphics every few years on the Playstation 3.
A Core2Duo with an 8800 GTX can run rings around a PS3, then slap it into next week to boot. Even an 8800 GT with a Core2 (and the core 2s are getting pretty cheap) are just fine at killing the PS3's power. Oh, and its only uphill from here. Wait a year than upgrade. The PS3 is going to have NOTHING on Intel's new line of chips, and the 9000 series is supposed to show up soon.
Sure, its probably a little more expensive, but cost isn't a huge factor, IMO. I think simplicity is bigger. If it was cost, than the gamecube would have won last generation - it was the cheapest.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Consoles just have too many advantages over PCs for the PC to be able to really compete. Over the last 20 years I've watched as genre after genre migrates to the consoles as they become capable of playing more kinds of games. You used to be able to walk into a store like Babbages and see the walls lined with computer games, with the NES and Sega carts sitting in a lonely shelf in the back. Today it's exactly the opposite, as I'm sure you all know.
I'm still a PC gamer because the games I like to play are still mostly only for PCs. But I know it's only a matter of time, with consoles now coming internet-ready, having high-res output, equipped with hard drives, and with advances in the controllers it seems they may finally come up with something that can replace the venerable (but quite versitile) keyboard, which, in my opinion, is the only thing the PC still has going for it.
Just think about it..
Cost - A new video card that's any good costs more than a console, and always has. And you need to buy a new one every year or you'll get left behind. While everything else may not need to be upgraded quite so often, a new gaming rig (with a good monitor) can easily be more than five times the cost of a current-gen console.
Comfort - A lot of people don't like sitting in a chair two feet from their monitor. I don't mind it because that's how I've always done it since I was playing Zork on a Commodore 64 so many years ago, but a lot of people want to be able to sit on the coach, kick their feet up, lie in bed, whatever. I can't really blame them either.
Pain-in-the-Ass Factor - Maintaining a PC (especially a high-end PC that can run new games) requires a level of technical know-how that your average user doesn't have and isn't particularly inclined to learn. A console is easy, you turn it on, put the game in, and it works. It doesn't matter that it's not upgradable or that it'll look dated after a while because they know in five years they'll go to the store and get a new one that's a lot better.
Piracy - Since day 1, PC gaming has always been plagued by piracy. Initially it wasn't a big deal since you'd just copy the disk, give it to your friends, and that was that, but once people started getting on Compuserve, AOL, and/or their local BBS's it started to happen that legit copies of games became the minority and it's been that way ever since. I've seen copy protection schemes ranging from having to look words up in the manual, this little nifty password wheel that came with Pool of Radiance (and all the gold-box TSR games, as I recall, was a long time ago though), to having to have the original disc inserted, to writing bad blocks on said original disc to make it harder to copy, to today's online activation.. it doesn't matter, they all get hacked, sometimes within a few hours of a big release. Consoles, with their proprietary hardware, have largely been immune to piracy (even after the switch to disc-based media).
You're not going to find a pc for 280$ what a 360 can do, or even 400$for what a Playstation 3 can do, trust me, you can't, I have been looking for a PC a few weeks ago, in price comparisson consoles absolutely slaughter PC's. Speaking in terms of gaming, you don't need the crap that is often deliverd with pc's. you do not need a 150$ Operating Windows Vista system. The Xbox360 and PS3 are both high end PC's, in fact, the Playstation 3 is used in research as a replacement for super computers. Anybody who argues that consoles are low to mid end computers obviously has no idea what he is talking about or has a very flawed definition of what is low to mid end.
If we look on what is on offer today in terms of games, it's quite obvious that the standards for high end pc gaming and console gaming in terms of graphics is exactly the same. Sure you have Crysis, but apart from that game there is no PC game out there that couldn't be done on consoles. Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, they're all considered to the top of the cream of graphics and they are avaible on both the PC and consoles. and ofcourse, Consoles haven't maxed out yet. Insomniac predicts a major leap in graphics every few years on the Playstation 3.
A Core2Duo with an 8800 GTX can run rings around a PS3, then slap it into next week to boot. Even an 8800 GT with a Core2 (and the core 2s are getting pretty cheap) are just fine at killing the PS3's power. Oh, and its only uphill from here. Wait a year than upgrade. The PS3 is going to have NOTHING on Intel's new line of chips, and the 9000 series is supposed to show up soon.
Sure, its probably a little more expensive, but cost isn't a huge factor, IMO. I think simplicity is bigger. If it was cost, than the gamecube would have won last generation - it was the cheapest.
Nobody is argueing that a pc in which the graphic card alone is more expensive then the entire PS3 system isn't more powerful, but the PS3 certainly isn't low end to mid end. But feel free to throw all your money at your PC, it's just a pity there are so very few games out there to make use of all that power.
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From an Infinity Ward Blog
"They Wonder Why People Don't Make PC Games Any More
On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).
Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I'll check and see; if I can I'll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do."
No annoying animated GIF here!
I don't think it's doom and gloom, but I have to say, the stuff that's currently out there is not what I consider top of the line MMORPG's. I play City of Heroes... but it's just a pacifier.. After the downfall of Star Wars G (yes I know it's worn out, but we lost a good game), since, I have struggled to find something worth my hard earned money. I do however, look forward to trying AoC. So, not all is lost.. yet..
IMHO, you could probably make a solid case that MMORPG sales are down on average (with the possible exception of WoW. which has been carrying MMO stats since its launch.) Nothing else is really doing anything to brag about in either design or numbers.
But to say PC gaming is in any sort of trouble after the line up of releases in 07 is a stretch of the imagination to say the least. Almost everything PC gaming touched (almost
) turned to gold last year outside of MMO's. (even the expansions were good for the mostpart)
I have to disagree with you here. Wow carries the largest numbers yes. But other than the freak accident that WoW numbers are other MMO titles are doing just fine. If they wherent then they would shut down. Sure MMO gaming might not be as popular as it is now but take WoW out of the picture and MMO's are doing just as well now as they where 7-10 years ago.To the OP no, I dont think PC games are hurting. The thing with both consol games and to a finer point, PC games thrive on is this. Its not the initial sales. Its the fact that they are STILL selling games a few years after the game is released. The reason for this is, I think, people like me who cant afford to upgrade every year or so to new equipment. We upgrade every year or so to older gear. What I mean by that is, what some of you buy new this year, we buy next year at a largely reduced price. So while I am not playing Bioshock ect now, in another year or so there will be alot like me who upgraded to old/new gear that can now play thoes games. That makes sales go up regardless of when the game was made.
Watch the video in original post.
And well. If you still do not understand.
Let say development of PC game costs 40 million dollars. They sell the games for 50 million (and they count themselves lucky)
Development of XBOX game costs 40 million dolars. They sell the game for 100 million (and they say they did so-so)
Now perhaps i am the dumb one. But if i had a development company , i would not even consider PC development with such figures.
And , if anything we all know game producers are not big risk takers
Well advantage of PC game is longevity. Console games are in and out in a few months but PC games can generate sales for years.
There are also a few other things that PC has the upper hand in right now.
The main drawback to PC gaming is primarily the expense of continual upgrading. Not everyone runs out to upgrade their PC everytime the next hot game releases. In fact someone here posted a survey that said something 60% of PC gamers can't even play the current generation of games (07). That probably has an enormous impact on sales. Comps purcahsed in 2005/06 are pretty much obsolete however your PS3 and Xbox 360 are still as it ever was.
I blame piracy in a big part. Its staggering how many people that pirate games for the pc. Go to any p2p site(torrent, direct connect etc.) and log on to their services. Do a search for any of the new pc game titles. You will find, and be able to download pirated copies in no time.
What the companies need is to have some foolproof copy-protection. Someone mentioned online activation, that is, the product is unusable if you dont activate it. Now that will cut down on all the piracy by quite a bit I think. The downside to that is that games will be more expensive, which you can blame the pirates for mostly. Its just too damn easy to pirate stuff nowadays.
Quality is ofcourse a big contributer to sales aswell, but when even quality titles sell like shit it tell us quite alot about pc gaming and its future. PC piracy is killing pc gaming, one developer at a time. Just imagine what the prices on stuff would be if there was no piracy, that is no need to put expensive copy protection on your products.
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Grammar nazi's. This one is for you.
I agree with sales being hurt by the piracy. I think online tag would be the best.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
The problem is cost. Want a top of the line gaming rig that can run most anything? Its $700+ dollars, and that's if you build it yourself.
You can get any two console systems for that price.
Meanwhile piracy is rampant. I would estimate literally 2-3 times as many people play these games as pay for them. In the case of video game piracy, it is NOT working like movie or music piracy. A lot of the time people will buy pirated movies because they look better, and hey the DVD is only $9.99. Sure, they don't buy the crap movies, but who cares? They're crap. SImilarly, many people are buying music and visiting concerts of their favorite pirated bands.
When it comes to paying $50 though, apparently people balk. Right before the company that made SIN Episodes went under, they reported that they were getting more tech support questions from people who had pirated the game than from legitimate buyers. Given that STEAM has a pretty advanced piracy protection feature, you can see the problem. And more people were ASKING! How many pirates are dumb enough to ask tech support their question?
The Witcher may have SOLD a million copies, but it has probably been played by 3 million people. And while console players lend disks to eachother, that's NOTHING compared to the insanity of PC Piracy. Its sick, and its sad, but I'm actually starting to support hardware-level DRM for gaming.
In the LFGame forum, there was a guy who was asking what new good games he could use on his rig. In addition to MMOs, Crysis and Witcher were suggested to him. He happily reported he was downloading both - this is people's first reaction when they hear of a hot new PC game.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson
The high cost of a good gaming rig (I've spent over $3K on mine) and rampant piracy that's been going on for over two decades have caused most games that can be played on consoles to move to consoles.
It started way back in the SNES days (which is when commercial PC platformers more or less died out) and continues to this day. As consoles have evolved to be able to handle more kinds of games I've seen the developers move, en masse, to consoles for those genres.
When the consoles started going 3D a lot of shooters, racing games, and 'free-form' games moved over to the consoles. PC was still king of everything online and everything that included downloadable content, but the current generation of consoles has taken that away as well.
Right now the PC is still king in a few areas though...
I'm not sure if this will change in the next generation or not (console makers have always been scared of giving gamers a complicated controller or a mouse, though if motion control improves a bit the Wii-mote style of controller could sub for one) but the trend has been for games to move to consoles for quite a while now and I don't really see that changing. There's also the fact that the PC is traditionally where most of the innovation in gaming takes place, since anyone can make a PC game and developing for consoles is pricey and makes devs less tolerant of risk.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
Wow. "Equal high end PCs." Whatever you're smoking, pass it over to those guys in HazMat gear. Geez, if you're going to talk about PC gaming dying and shoveling cost per hardware as a reason, you're just blabbing out the equivalent of bovine droppings. Get a clue.
I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console.
So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink.
"are easily done on consoles." Yet again. Get a clue. They're made on Developer Workstations. Read: developer PCs. In any case, they're first and foremost plausible on the PC until finalized on an engine optimized for consoles. I'd hand over a pistol to the sorry dev who'd have to develop on a memory limited console.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
Three months extended warranty. Where? Timbuctoo? Give me a break. Only the privi'ed have consoles here. And those that managed to steal one or two would rather pirate the game than buy originals for non-existent support - or be treated as trash by the companies they sought to support, whichever comes first. Good luck, ol' mighty gaming titans, on making money on games.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
Actually, using steam cuts down on piracy, a lot. It's harder to get a cd-key, that has not been used yet on a torrented game, while trying to activate it on steam. They will come up with the message of, "This cd-key is already registered to another account." Unlike most games where you can still install and play them with the same cd-key as someone else, but just can't play online. (Could still use lan, or hamachi =p). And, well, I know it does, because I tried it. I remember when hl2 first came out, I wanted to torrent it to see if it was really worth my money, but the only way to use it without steam, was a complicated way and I was too lazy too attempt it =x.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
Wow. "Equal high end PCs." Whatever you're smoking, pass it over to those guys in HazMat gear. Geez, if you're going to talk about PC gaming dying and shoveling cost per hardware as a reason, you're just blabbing out the equivalent of bovine droppings. Get a clue.
I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console.
So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink.
"are easily done on consoles." Yet again. Get a clue. They're made on Developer Workstations. Read: developer PCs. In any case, they're first and foremost plausible on the PC until finalized on an engine optimized for consoles. I'd hand over a pistol to the sorry dev who'd have to develop on a memory limited console.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
Three months extended warranty. Where? Timbuctoo? Give me a break. Only the privi'ed have consoles here. And those that managed to steal one or two would rather pirate the game than buy originals for non-existent support - or be treated as trash by the companies they sought to support, whichever comes first. Good luck, ol' mighty gaming titans, on making money on games.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
"I doubt your high end PC sitting under that LCD TV can sit there and become any type of server except a gaming server or some protein folder. It won't help you create, store, and print out documents you need for school or work, spruce up material to earn a buck, and hell, even be a decent platform for anything other than gaming. Heck, I doubt you got that message typed out in your own console."What part of PC GAMING did you not understand? Why would I want it to become a server? We're talking about PC gaming here. create and store and print out documents, big deal, I can do that on a 10 year old PC I can pick up for 20$. I don't need a high end PC that can run the latest games for that.
"So you like to compare the cost of a PC to a console and say the PC costs most? Well no duh. It does more than a console. Better to have a US$ 2000 rig that can help you earn some smart money than a US$400 box that couldn't even make up for its cost until it RRoD'ed and got you a free heatsink."
Again we're talking about gaming here, not what you need it for work. I know it's shocking to some die hard PC nerds working in the IT section for over 20 years now, but not every profession needs a 2k USD rig to do your job.
On another note, consoles are ALSO a minority. I really hate it when people love to view things from just their SIDE of the globe. If you haven't guessed, tons more gamers are in the east. And hell, console support from the three giants are next to nothing, from where we're standing. No Xbox Live to call our own and re-routed PSN. Heck, the games come from Australia or Japan and no local support for scratched Halo CDs were given.
PC gaming is dead in Japan as well. PC gaming is shrinking in the US and really only Europe, Korea and China are left. Very few korean and chinese games reach the west while there are plenty of japanese console games comming to the west, so there will be less modern games comming out for the PC as compared to consoles.
PC gaming is dying. That's some overrated media crap right there. Highly inaccurate. The PC "mainstream" game is dying. Or rather, the PC "mainstream" game of the west is dying. The days of the independent developers is nigh, and the PC game is diversifying across other segments of the gaming population. In other parts of the globe you pro'lly couldn't point out on an atlas. There are so many games coming out right now that deserve their own share of the limelight, and the weakening of the mainstream games - from the mainstream dev companies - is just what they need.
Well, you better start working on your Korean and Chinese languages if you would like to play those games.
We all have to listen to "PC Gaming is dead" every 4-5 years or so whenever "next-gen consoles" release their next-gen. It's silly really when you consider:
- The percentage of console owners that own a PC is quite high, but the converse is not true -
So question for game publishers/developers is really: Given that the penetration of the PC is quite a bit higher than any of the consoles, why do console games outsell their PC counterparts 4 or 5 to 1?
I think this is where the openness of the PC actually hurt it. Over the last decade, people have learned that:
People who just don't want to deal with those issues, and would rather play games while lounging on a couch with their friends will play more console games, even though they also own a PC. None of this means PC gaming is dead though, it's just changing as it always does when new consoles get released. Unfortunately, when Starcraft II ships in a couple years and dwarfs the sales of any one console game except maybe Halo (much like WoW, the Sims, Age of Empires II all did), there will be no fanfare of how PC gaming is killing consoles.
There has always been more bad games, than good. That will always be the case, for some reason. PC gaming is surely declining as consoles become more powerful and flexible.
Issues like Windows Vista just reinforces the fact that PC gaming must become more stable and reliable if its going to be a viable market down the road.
I won't say that bad games are ruining PC gaming, because the consoles have more than their fair share of horribly designed and buggy games.
i dont think consoles popilarity has that much to do with price. PCs are such temprimental peices of shit. as much as I love mine, so many errors and problems really piss me off. most people don't have the time or knowledge to try and sort this kind of crap out. firewalls, bugs, lag, errors, viruses, freezing, PC language most people cant understand (mhz, cl4 etc.). the simplicity of consoles and ease of use is what sells them.
its why macs are becoming so popular in terms of non gaming pc's (shame they are balls for games).
My blog:
As long as there are PCs, there will be games made for them.
Hell there's even a market for cell phone games now.
Developers and publishers will always make games for any platform possible.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
I would have liked to have bought more, but no one made any.
The Burning Crusade sold 3 million copies in 24 hours.
It was the same the year X-box came out. PC games turned to poo as all we got was ports for a while.
Make a decent game and it will sell. Don't bother, and it won't.
There's also the problem of too many goddamn RTS games for the PC. Along with the fact that not all console games make it to PC.
However, pc has something going for it that none of the consoles have, and that's MMO's.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
XBox 360's and PS3 = low to mid end PC's. You can't actually buy a new PC that isn't twice as powerful. No one has made anything that low spec for over 3 years now. The GFX are 2 generations old, the processors, abandonware designs that the PC market passed over in favour of the Athlon 64. The RAM is slow and substantially less than commonly found in many of todays mobile phones.
They still rock of course, but I wouldn't be getting any silly idea's about them being high powered in comparison to PC's.
I think you may have confused a comparison of the expected power of the console, 3 years before it came out with the PC's of that date and forgot to re-make comparison of what is actually on offer today.
Add to that a basic gaming PC costs less than a PS3 as does it's software and any price argument hardly holds water. As you say the console cost is subsidised by a premium on the games. It isn't cheaper for the end user, and there is simply no way any console manufacturer can compete with PC for hardware prices, their market is positively tiny by comparison.
For the record, computer manufacturers also sell their products at a loss when they are seeking to gain market share with a new product in a competative market. This is common practise in most industries. Intel do it all the time.
I think some one needs to recognise when he has been pitched a sale.
No they're not. Computer manufactors sell hardware at a profit, consoles are sold at a loss which is made up through software sales. also Xbox360 and PS3 equal high end pc's, not mid level pc's. PC gaming is dying at worst and turning into a very small niche genre at best. The hardware is to expensive and the features are dropping one by one. Online Multiplayer? Now avaible on Consoles. Mods? Now avaible on consoles.
ofcourse we get the old tiresome argument :"b-but I can upgrade my PC!" yeah well guess what: You're a minority. The vast majority of people are not prepared to pay up 200$ ~ 300$ every 2 years, so you're not going to be the target audience for the vast majority of game developers. Games like Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and UT3, all considered to be some of the best looking games avaible, are easily done on consoles.
XBox 360's and PS3 = low to mid end PC's. You can't actually buy a new PC that isn't twice as powerful. No one has made anything that low spec for over 3 years now. The GFX are 2 generations old, the processors, abandonware designs that the PC market passed over in favour of the Athlon 64. The RAM is slow and substantially less than commonly found in many of todays mobile phones.
They still rock of course, but I wouldn't be getting any silly idea's about them being high powered in comparison to PC's.
I think you may have confused a comparison of the expected power of the console, 3 years before it came out with the PC's of that date and forgot to re-make comparison of what is actually on offer today.
Add to that a basic gaming PC costs less than a PS3 as does it's software and any price argument hardly holds water. As you say the console cost is subsidised by a premium on the games. It isn't cheaper for the end user, and there is simply no way any console manufacturer can compete with PC for hardware prices, their market is positively tiny by comparison.
For the record, computer manufacturers also sell their products at a loss when they are seeking to gain market share with a new product in a competative market. This is common practise in most industries. Intel do it all the time.
I think some one needs to recognise when he has been pitched a sale.
You're not going to find a pc for 280$ what a 360 can do, or even 400$for what a Playstation 3 can do, trust me, you can't, I have been looking for a PC a few weeks ago, in price comparisson consoles absolutely slaughter PC's. Speaking in terms of gaming, you don't need the crap that is often deliverd with pc's. you do not need a 150$ Operating Windows Vista system. The Xbox360 and PS3 are both high end PC's, in fact, the Playstation 3 is used in research as a replacement for super computers. Anybody who argues that consoles are low to mid end computers obviously has no idea what he is talking about or has a very flawed definition of what is low to mid end.
If we look on what is on offer today in terms of games, it's quite obvious that the standards for high end pc gaming and console gaming in terms of graphics is exactly the same. Sure you have Crysis, but apart from that game there is no PC game out there that couldn't be done on consoles.
Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, they're all considered to the top of the cream of graphics and they are avaible on both the PC and consoles. and ofcourse, Consoles haven't maxed out yet. Insomniac predicts a major leap in graphics every few years on the Playstation 3.
As you can see, the difference between a game running on a high end pc and a Xbox360 game is very, very small
www.gamespot.com/features/6178185/p-2.html
Sure, its probably a little more expensive, but cost isn't a huge factor, IMO. I think simplicity is bigger. If it was cost, than the gamecube would have won last generation - it was the cheapest.
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson
Consoles just have too many advantages over PCs for the PC to be able to really compete. Over the last 20 years I've watched as genre after genre migrates to the consoles as they become capable of playing more kinds of games. You used to be able to walk into a store like Babbages and see the walls lined with computer games, with the NES and Sega carts sitting in a lonely shelf in the back. Today it's exactly the opposite, as I'm sure you all know.
I'm still a PC gamer because the games I like to play are still mostly only for PCs. But I know it's only a matter of time, with consoles now coming internet-ready, having high-res output, equipped with hard drives, and with advances in the controllers it seems they may finally come up with something that can replace the venerable (but quite versitile) keyboard, which, in my opinion, is the only thing the PC still has going for it.
Just think about it..
Cost - A new video card that's any good costs more than a console, and always has. And you need to buy a new one every year or you'll get left behind. While everything else may not need to be upgraded quite so often, a new gaming rig (with a good monitor) can easily be more than five times the cost of a current-gen console.
Comfort - A lot of people don't like sitting in a chair two feet from their monitor. I don't mind it because that's how I've always done it since I was playing Zork on a Commodore 64 so many years ago, but a lot of people want to be able to sit on the coach, kick their feet up, lie in bed, whatever. I can't really blame them either.
Pain-in-the-Ass Factor - Maintaining a PC (especially a high-end PC that can run new games) requires a level of technical know-how that your average user doesn't have and isn't particularly inclined to learn. A console is easy, you turn it on, put the game in, and it works. It doesn't matter that it's not upgradable or that it'll look dated after a while because they know in five years they'll go to the store and get a new one that's a lot better.
Piracy - Since day 1, PC gaming has always been plagued by piracy. Initially it wasn't a big deal since you'd just copy the disk, give it to your friends, and that was that, but once people started getting on Compuserve, AOL, and/or their local BBS's it started to happen that legit copies of games became the minority and it's been that way ever since. I've seen copy protection schemes ranging from having to look words up in the manual, this little nifty password wheel that came with Pool of Radiance (and all the gold-box TSR games, as I recall, was a long time ago though), to having to have the original disc inserted, to writing bad blocks on said original disc to make it harder to copy, to today's online activation.. it doesn't matter, they all get hacked, sometimes within a few hours of a big release. Consoles, with their proprietary hardware, have largely been immune to piracy (even after the switch to disc-based media).
Sure, its probably a little more expensive, but cost isn't a huge factor, IMO. I think simplicity is bigger. If it was cost, than the gamecube would have won last generation - it was the cheapest.
Nobody is argueing that a pc in which the graphic card alone is more expensive then the entire PS3 system isn't more powerful, but the PS3 certainly isn't low end to mid end. But feel free to throw all your money at your PC, it's just a pity there are so very few games out there to make use of all that power.